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BOOK REVIEW

The Angry Genie
One Man's Walk Through the Nuclear Age
By Karl Z. Morgan and Ken M. Peterson

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999
240 pp., $24.95, cloth
ISBN: 0-8061-3122-5

[During the Cold War] we gave almost no consideration to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the danger of plutonium getting into the hands of terrorists. Today hundreds of nuclear power plants exist, producing electricity and weapons materials. None is inherently safe, and weapons-grade plutonium is more accessible to terrorists that ever before.

— The Angry Genie: One Man's Walk through the Nuclear Age

Dr. K.Z. Morgan, widely regarded as the "father of health physics," worked for 29 years establishing and implementing procedures designed to protect workers and the public from the dangers of producing nuclear weapons at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. After his retirement, he continued to support procedures and regulations that recognized the dangers of nuclear materials and the truth that, as he puts it, "there is no 'safe' level of exposure to radiation."

In the months before his death on June 8, 1999, Dr. Morgan (along with attorney Ken M. Peterson) wrote The Angry Genie: One Man's Walk Through the Nuclear Age recounting major events in his life and some of his understandings about radiation, the current status of health physics, and nuclear waste disposal. The book is important reading for a better understanding of the development of what Morgan calls the "nuclear-industrial complex," which comprises the U.S. military, the nuclear weapons agency (Department of Energy), and the nuclear power industry.

In 1943, Dr. Morgan was called first to the University of Chicago and then to Oak Ridge, then under construction, to participate in the secret Manhattan Project to build a nuclear bomb for use in World War II. Morgan's work was in three areas: measuring fast neutrons at the nuclear reactor, looking for new kinds or unpredicted types of dangerous radiation, and training workers and management in radiation protection. He learned and tried to teach others that "complacency can never be permitted when one deals with atomic energy" and he recounts various examples of the severe consequences, including deaths, that have resulted from such complacency.

Dr. Morgan describes his own biggest mistake when, in 1971, the wishes of his employer and his own fears that he might cost hundreds of people at Oak Ridge their jobs made him change a major international speech so that it did not criticize the safety of the nuclear power reactor technology which was being developed and has been used since. He writes: "I should have stood my ground regardless of the consequences. Had I done so, perhaps the world would never have had reactors like those at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island."

Of his successes after his retirement from Oak Ridge, Dr. Morgan recounts his expert testimony in court cases against the nuclear industry in the Karen Silkwood case in 1979 and against his former employer, the U.S. government, in 1984 in support of victims claiming damages for cancer and leukemia from nuclear weapons testing. Those two radiation cases established important principles. The Silkwood case resulted in a jury verdict of $10.5 million for the family. But Morgan believes the case also "brought to the forefront one of the worst fears of the nuclear industry: educating the public that there is no such thing as a 'safe dose' of radiation."

The second case was about the integrity of the government, which knew, but did not tell victims, of the dangers of radiation from nuclear weapons tests. The judge ruled that the government was negligent because it "failed to adequately and continuously inform individuals and communities near the test site of well-known and inexpensive methods to prevent, minimize or mitigate the known or foreseeable long-range biological consequences of exposure to radioactive fallout." However, the decision was set aside on appeal.

Morgan strongly criticizes the current state of health physics, which he and others founded with the mission to protect and defend persons receiving radiation exposures. But he cites various examples that illustrate that the majority of the health physics profession "has sacrificed its integrity" for its nuclear-industrial complex employers by depreciating radiation injury and serving "as convincing expert witnesses to prevent employees and members of the public who suffered radiation injury from receiving just compensation."

Despite the efforts of Dr. Morgan and many others, more than 15 years later, Congress has still not passed laws to adequately compensate fallout victims and others exposed from the nuclear-industrial complex, nor have policymakers or the U.S. government established adequate standards to protect workers and the public from some ongoing radiation exposures.

The extensive technical information that is of interest to specialists is mostly relegated to 19 pages of footnotes, so the book is generally easy reading.

The book ends with Dr. Morgan's personal "reflection and resolution" at age 91, which briefly brings together his Christian faith, inspired by his Lutheran minister father, and his scientific training to state some principal religious beliefs, his view of the importance of free speech, ideas about nuclear waste disposal, and concerns about nuclear weapons. He concludes with the question that he frequently asked himself and others: would the nuclear genie create "a happier life for all humankind" and "a new period of cooperation and advancement for the world?" Or would its adverse consequences -- reverberate through future generations" and be the beginning of the end for humanity?

—Don Hancock

Available from:
University of Oklahoma Press
4100 28th Ave., N.W.
Norman, OK 73069
800/627-7377

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